Interview with Kiwiseeds

The boys from up north have done it again. Kiwiseeds recently won Best Indica at the High Times Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, so CHRIS FOWLIE sat down for a session with founder Tim A’Court.

Chris: Congratulations for winning your second Cannabis Cup! Could you take us through what happened, what you entered and why?

Tim: We entered the Mt Cook this year which is a plant that didn’t come from anywhere near Mt Cook, it is just the beautiful name that we gave it. It is a true Indica, one of the first when we were bringing Indica seeds back from overseas in the late 80s early 90s. We started playing round with them and this was something we came up with. Since then we brought it back to Amsterdam, and have crossed it, bettered it and made it into the hybrid kind of bigger plant. It is a fat leaved Indica with lots of crystals and grows in nice short seasons and has that typical Indica quality which is lots of strength.

Unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of it. This was a selection from a group of seeds that we have grown out. It happened to be much better than the last one we had. For the cup we have to enter nearly 100 grams of weed and it took up everything we had. I know people were not happy they didn’t get a change to taste it or have any of it!

Me included! Speaking of taste, the High Times judging crew said they all agreed Mt Cook was the best and said it was a clear winner.

Yep, I’ve heard that as well from the lady who fills the jars for the judges. She came in and got her packet of Mt Cook seeds before she left and she said the same thing. I’m absolutely rapt. I mean the seed cup is always great. We don’t have a coffeeshop so I don’t win coffeeshop prizes but the seed cup is the real one. The samples are there and people vote on what they see and taste. It is a blind test so there is no buying of votes or persuasion from other people. So we are absolutely rapt and there are a whole lot of seed companies who are astounded that we’ve taken not just the Sativa Cup two years ago but now we’ve got the Indica Cup. We have never really been known as Indica-type people. Our idea was originally to be the Sativa varieties that we grew in New Zealand in the early days; to capture some of the genetics that we were rapidly losing in New Zealand due to skunk varieties and other various things coming in.

Before you got to Amsterdam what were you getting up to in New Zealand?

Ever since I was a kid, the whole family was a horticulture family and we still are. Over the years my crazy mum who I guess I should blame everything on has grown everything from sweet peas to boysenberries and loganberries. We have always had glass houses, open ground market gardening kind of thing. When I was 15 I left school – stupidly, but not stupidly. The marijuana thing was just a sideline. It was just another herb in the garden in those days. Of course we realised we could grow it and we had friends who all wanted it so it became something that we were good at, a young age. I think my brother and I had our first plants when we were 13 years old. I’m the first one to say it is not a complicated plant. It’s not a hard plant to grow. Breeding is a different story. It is really easy for anyone to grow in so many different ways. It’s a fantastic medicine.

I hear in those days you were a member of Norml in Whangarei and did a bit of activism.

We were all big members of Norml. I realized that is wasn’t fair that a lot of friends were in court for having a roach in there pocket. It was destroying young peoples lives. I joined Norml and every Thursday we would go to the court house with pockets full of joints and smoke them on the steps and we would try and get in. On several occasions we had these sessions going in the middle of the court house. There were often police coming up from Auckland and they would just go nuts – grabbing people, absolute chaos and violence. It made the whole thing look stupid.

What sort of growing did you get up to in New Zealand?

The typical guerrilla growing – cages in the bush. Then we got a little bit sneaky and realised that putting it right under peoples noses was actually the best way. We actually ended up night time gardening right on the edges of towns. After that we moved to the Hawkes Bay and down there was huge demand for this stuff but the price was incredibly high compared to up North. We ended up going back up north and putting our patches out and feeding the people of Hawkes Bay with our produce. The last couple of years we went back to Northland and tried pretty unsuccessfully to pull off the big one – we didn’t pull it off but at the end we had just enough to come back to the UK. The rest is history.

What do you put your success down to?

Just being humble kiwis not being full of bullshit. We have stuck to the really basic old varieties crossed with some things we have brought in from NZ. We haven’t gone too far off, we have kept the hybrid vigour, we haven’t bred and bred into some strange little thing. It can get all too complicated. We need to get back to the basics. I like to keep it really simple when people come into the grow shop and need advice. I don’t want to sell them every bottle of potion in the shop which is how it comes in a grow shop in the end.

What is your top tip for growing the best marijuana around – from the Kiwiseeds catalogue of course!

Keep it simple – you can get carried away with additives. Stick to what is known. Marijuana requires a lot of food. It is a very fast growing annual – the growing and nutrition of it is very important.

If people want to recapture that old style Kiwi taste what should they be going for?

There are couple of strains we have that are typical kiwi weeds. One of them is “2 Pounder” which was really famous up north when I was a kid. We brought it back into Holland and we have made it into more of a super hybrid that really can produce a lot of weed if people have got a bit more room. It really is that classic big old kiwi sativa with that lovely sativa taste and high. The other one would be Mako Haze. We had a plant that we nicknamed Mako in the north and we brought this back in clone form and crossed it with the Haze. We managed to capture the spice and taste of the New Zealand bush weed.

Have you kept that original cutting alive?

Yes – we have to keep it all going, and we do rely a lot on original stock that we’ve still got going. You have to keep it not just in one place but two or three places, just to make sure. If one goes down or we get busted, they take everything. One of my biggest nightmares is to keep it going. Every 3 or 4 weeks the clones are replenished in each place. I think we have got about 150 different things in vegetation all the time, just for the mothers and fathers for all those different things. You can always go back to seed but there is nothing like the original stock. I know a few people in town, different seed breeders, quite famous ones, who have lost everything at one stage and they have tried to bring it back from nothing. That is a big shame but it is also something that happens in an illegal situation.

The perception from people outside Holland is often that it is very liberal, that it is legal and that you can do anything, but the reality seems a lot different.

It has been going backwards, but even when it was at its peak, all it meant is that the Dutch people are pragmatic people, and the Dutch always saw this as a personal liberty. Rather than go in all guns blazing they decided it was better to try have some control but also at the same time try and separate the soft drugs from the hard drugs. All they did was say that personal use of drugs should not be a criminal offence, so coffee shops were allowed. The idea was to take it out of residential areas and put it where it could be controlled. But the problem is the supply to the coffeeshops is illegal, and the coffeeshops are only allowed to have 500 grams. The “backdoor” as we call it is totally illegal. As a grower it is completely illegal.

What can New Zealand learn from the Dutch scene?

It has always been such a shame that we couldn’t do something like the Dutch. I still see New Zealand as having the opportunity to be an eco-paradise. If we said in New Zealand tomorrow that we would decriminalise marijuana we would have hordes of tourists wanting to come and lie down and smoke a joint, because people say it is so far away and when you get there you can’t score anything! Give people their weed and let them have a holiday in paradise.

So what does the future hold for you and kiwi seeds?

We have won the cup again this year and I was almost looking to take a break but the race is on to get out all the seeds that are in the catalogue this year. We are doing some feminised seeds this year, purely through pressure to do that. I really don’t like the idea of spreading genetically modified seeds round the world and ruining our stocks of plants.

When people buy feminised seeds what would you caution them about?

If they have any love for marijuana and the species as a whole, if you buy feminised seeds you should grow them, clone them and flower them but don’t try and seed them. If you grow a plant and it is a couple of months old and a couple of feet high you can sex it there and then. Just take a gauze bag, stick it over the very lower branch. Doesn’t have to be perfectly 12/12. Give it a lot of darkness and a little bit of air as well and that branch will sex and you can pull it out or keep growing it. It means that you don’t need to have feminised seeds.

Are you looking for new strains if people back home have the meanest weed around and want to get that to you?

Absolutely. Just give us an email or ring or put it in a video case. We actually supply little containers if people want to send a clone. We would be absolutely honoured to grow those things
out.

Maybe we could get the Mako Haze back and enter the Auckland Cup! Are there official overseas sites that people can go to to buy your seeds?

We sell to distributors and some of those take the risk for selling overseas, mainly everyonedoesit.co.uk. There is no problem with it at the moment but as a producer we have to be careful. England seems to have no problems sending anywhere in the world.

So there you have it, go for the English sites. Thanks to Tim, Dave and all the crew at Kiwiseeds, and here’s to winning your third Cup!